NYC hairstylist to Michael Bloomberg, Tom Wolfe dies from coronavirus
Alberto Rottura — a New York City hairstylist whose clients included bold names like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Wolfe — died after a weeks-long battle with the coronavirus, his family said.
Rottura, 77, passed away last Monday at Lenox Hill Hospital, where he had been fighting COVID-19 since early April.
The immigrant son of an Italian winemaker, Rottura moved to Manhattan as a teenager in 1960, before becoming a US citizen and opening his first salon at 23 years old, said his son Gianluca Rottura.
“He was a real renaissance man,” his son told The Post. “He really had a love for people and was very, very generous with everything he worked for — which was a lot.”
The elder Rottura, who studied hairdressing in Paris and London, befriended Judy Garland early in his career and traveled the world with her as her personal hairstylist for two years.
His salon, Alberto Dei Montecchi on Madison Ave. and E. 78th St., would eventually bring in clients that included the most prominent figures in the city — such as former mayor Michael Bloomberg, best-selling authors Mary Higgins Clark and Tom Wolfe, and former governor Eliot Spitzer before his bust in an escort scandal.
A jovial Rottura once said his well-heeled clients usually started as customers because of the women in their lives.
“A lot of the men we do here are usually the husband, boyfriend or lover of one of the women who are our clients,” Rottura told The New York Times in a 2009 profile.
But Rottura, who spoke five languages and became a fixture in his Upper East Side community, also had his hands in other businesses around the neighborhood. He opened the famed Sistina Restaurant and the wine store In Vino Veritas, still located on First Ave. and now run by Gianluca and another son, Gianbruno.
He also owned real estate in the neighborhood and let some of his tenants pay little to no rent, because he still understood the struggles of life in the city, family said.
“He had one guy in an apartment and charged him pretty much nothing,” Gianluca said. “He let him live practically rent-free … because he felt bad.”
Rottura is survived by his sons, his wife, Liliana, two grandchildren, a brother, a sister, and several nieces and nephews.
Gianluca said the hardest part is knowing his father died alone, unable to accept visitors because of a strict policy to keep infected patients isolated in order to control the spread of the virus.
“He was in a room all by himself, with a plastic tarp around him,” his son said. “We couldn’t see him. The only people he had contact with looked like astronauts.
“He was such a social guy … this was the exact opposite of who he was.”